// Barrett Fox

Last time, we looked at how an interactive VR sculpture could be created with the Leap Motion Graphic Renderer as part of an experiment in interaction design. With the sculpture’s shapes rendering, we can now craft and code the layout and control of this 3D shape pool and the reactive behaviors of the individual objects.

By adding the Interaction Engine to our scene and InteractionBehavior components to each object, we have the basis for grasping, touching and other interactions. But for our VR sculpture, we can also use the Interaction Engine’s robust and performant awareness of hand proximity. With this foundation, we can experiment quickly with different reactions to hand presence, pinching, and touching specific objects. Let’s dive in!

With the next generation of mobile VR/AR experiences on the horizon, our team is constantly pushing the boundaries of our VR UX developer toolkit. Recently we created a quick VR sculpture prototype that combines the latest and greatest of these tools.

The Leap Motion Interaction Engine lets developers give their virtual objects the ability to be picked up, thrown, nudged, swatted, smooshed, or poked. With our new Graphic Renderer Module, you also have access to weapons-grade performance optimizations for power-hungry desktop VR and power-ravenous mobile VR.

In this post, we’ll walk through a small project built using these tools. This will provide a technical and workflow overview as one example of what’s possible – plus some VR UX design exploration and performance optimizations along the way.

Creating new 3D hand assets for your Leap Motion projects can be a real challenge. That’s why, based on your feedback, we’ve massively automated and streamlined the pipeline for connecting 3D models to our Core Assets with Hands Module 2.0 – so what used to take hours only takes a minute or two. You can […]

With our latest Unity Core Assets release, we’re excited to unveil full support for the Unity 5.4 beta, which features native support for the HTC Vive. This is the fourth release since the previous installment in this series, when we shared some background on the ground-up re-architecting of our hand data pipeline. Today we’re going […]

Leap Motion’s new Orion software represents a radical shift in our controller’s ability to see your hands. In tandem, we’ve also been giving our Unity toolset an overhaul from the ground up. The Core Asset Orion documentation has details on using the tools and the underlying API, but to help you get acquainted, here’s some […]

At Leap Motion, we’ve been working on new resources to make developing VR/AR applications easier, including Widgets – fundamental UI building blocks for Unity. In part 3, Barrett talks about the strange physics bugs we encountered with Time Dial.

One of our new VR Widgets, the Time Dial, surprised (and indeed amused!) us at several special moments during our intense production push. The Time Dial Widget is our hand-enabled VR interpretation of a typical touch interface’s Date Picker. We built it with a combination of Wilbur Yu’s Widget interaction base, Daniel’s data-binding framework (more on those two later), and a graphic front-end that I coded and built – again using Unity’s new 3D GUI.

At Leap Motion, we’ve been working on new resources to make developing VR/AR applications easier, including Widgets – fundamental UI building blocks for Unity. In part two, we take a look at the development of the Arm HUD Widget.

Hi, Barrett Fox here. As an interaction engineer here at Leap Motion, I built the Arm HUD for the Planetarium. While we introduced an early version of Arm HUD in December, I wanted to share what we learned from its evolution and development.